Mary McCarthy

by Mary McCarthy

  “You’re playing on words,” she protested. “Though to me, John, to speak frankly, all religious people seem a little mad.” “That’s because you don’t believe in godhead,” he retorted. “You don’t believe in the black reality of the night of separation our friend Hen is undergoing.” The three moved closer to the fire. Domna met John’s eyes. “No,” she said, squarely, “I don’t. Except as a metaphor. But I am willing to pity him if you want.” John firmly shook his head. “You don’t pity him, Domna; you’re ashamed for him; you’ve just told us so yourself.” Domna considered. “I think I feel pity mixed with horror. I should like to avert my eyes. This is not the proper Aristotelian compound, as Henry himself would be the first to say. What is requisite for the tragic spectacle is pity and terror compounded—pity for the tragic victim, terror for oneself, in so far as the victim is oneself, universalized, by extension. But I cannot feel that Henry is myself and I can only feel horror of him. Noli me tangere.” She shuddered. “I had the misfortune to be born into the upper classes and I cannot respond to suffering when the sufferer is base. And it seems to me now—forgive me for saying it—that this arrogant Henry has the soul of a slave. No doubt this cringing soul reflects social conditions; one has only to look at Henry to imagine the matrix that formed him—a poor heredity, hagiolatrous parents, a nasty and narrow environment, sweets, eyestrain, dental caries. I detest the social order which sprouts these mildewed souls—all that should be changed, for everybody; nobody should be permitted to grow up in such a bodily tenement. But there is also in each individual the faculty of transcendence; there is in each of us a limited freedom. I myself have been poor and I am not sentimental about poverty—poor people must be judged, like the rest of us. Poverty has certain favorable aspects: the poor are free of money-guilt and the sophisms and insincerities that go with it. Poverty and bad heredity are not a blanket pardon; need palliates Henry’s behavior but it is not a justification.” “Very true,” agreed John. “But who is to do the judging, Domna? You? I?” She hesitated and then grew reckless. “Yes, I. Why not? I, you, everybody. Everybody who will judge himself has the right to judge others and to be judged also. This abrogation of judgment you practice is an insult to man’s dignity. Everybody has the right to be judged and to judge in his turn. This ‘understanding’ you accord Henry is dangerous, both to him and to you. God is our judge, you will tell me. But there is no God. God is man.” The blasphemous words rang out; the windows rattled; but John seemed unaffected. “God is man, Domna, if you wish,” he said gravely. “But He is not men.”

  Domna suddenly looked tired. “No,” she admitted. “I suppose in a certain way I am on your side. If I presume to judge Henry, I don’t presume to punish him. That is not my affair.” She sighed. “And yet I can’t help but feel that I’m implicated in a frightful swindle. When I think of how soundly I rated Dr. Hoar this morning!” She gave an unwilling laugh. “After all, you were in good faith,” said Virginia. “I wonder,” replied Domna. “I think really, in my heart, I knew all along too. I think I hid from myself what I did not want to see. I didn’t dare ask myself what Cathy must be thinking; to ask would have implied an answer I didn’t wish to get. My pride, I imagine, undid me; I could not stand to be wrong.”

  John gave the fire a final poke; the last red ember dissolved in a shower of sparks. “Let me console you,” he said abruptly, as though he had been withholding this last piece of information till Domna had spent herself. “I don’t think Cathy’s health had much to do with Maynard’s decision—assuming he made it this morning. What impressed him most was the faculty support for Hen: he hadn’t quite expected it and was relieved, in a way, to find it was there. I think between ourselves, as Maynard would say, that Maynard had a good many qualms about letting Hen go. Quite aside from Cathy, Maynard has a pretty fair idea of the employment picture and he knows as well as the rest of us that Hen’s prospects aren’t too bright. Nobody likes to have the feeling that he may be sending a man with five dependents out onto the relief rolls, and whatever Hen may say of him, Maynard, in his way, is a very decent fellow. The letter he sent Hen may have been something in the nature of a trial balloon, to test faculty reaction. He wasn’t anxious to let Hen go, but on the other hand, he couldn’t keep him in the face of the bursar and the trustees, without some faculty backing. Now he can go to the money-bags and announce that a valued group in the faculty considers that Hen’s departure would be an intellectual loss to the college. That was what he wanted to hear; so long as he had the impression that Hen was an intellectual liability, he couldn’t in fairness to the students argue for retaining him as a teacher. Maynard himself is quite at sea in these cultural matters; he honestly wants to be told who is who and what is what. He meant it when he told us he was grateful to us for our visit—we forced him to take a line he’d been half wanting to take. In a word, we accepted responsibility.”

  He got to his feet rather stiffly and solemnly. The fire had died out; it was nearly dawn; a few roosters were crowing; a high-pitched dog barked. “Milking-time,” he said, going to the window. “Time to go to bed.” Virginia lit a candle and let the wax drip into a saucer to fix it; she handed it to Domna, who reluctantly pulled herself up. The word, responsibility, seemed to lie on her shoulders like a burden. John’s practical and reassuring exordium, it appeared, had sunk her into new perplexities. With Virginia in the lead, carrying the oil lamp, they went single file up the stairs, on tiptoe, so as not to wake the baby, whose six o’clock feeding was less than an hour off. In the upstairs hall Domna suddenly detained John. “Responsibility,” she whispered, “what does it mean, we accept responsibility for Henry? Does it mean we underwrite him for one year, or are we stuck for life?” Her candle trembled as she laughed, rather nervously. “For one year, I should think,” said John. “And Communism,” she murmured, “do you still think that had nothing to do with it?” In the darkness, he looked at her rather oddly, with a wry twist of the long jaw, but she could not see this; the flame of her candle lit up only her own face. “No,” he said, stolidly, in his ordinary speaking voice. He gripped her arm and drew her toward him till he could kiss her, dryly, on the forehead. “Sleep well,” he adjured, with a curious creak in his voice. “The sleep of the just.”

  CHAPTER X

  Mulcahy Finds a Disciple

  HENRY MULCAHY’s contract was renewed late in February. He at once let it be known that he signed under pressure; the new contract contained no provision for the rise in salary to which length of service now entitled him. But faculty opinion, as he probed it, was neutral for once on a salary question. Nobody denied the facts, but nobody seemed anxious to act on them. There seemed to be a movement to flee from the subject, as from an embarrassing connection, even while it was being admitted that, yes, there was a certain “hardship,” as if the admission wholly relieved the speaker of the need of doing anything about it. Of all those who assured him, with an air of expert knowledge, that he had better settle down and forget it, nobody volunteered to tell him how he was going to support six people on thirty-two hundred a year. The common prescription was that he should try “creative” writing—with four children in the house!—even his wife, Cathy, subscribed to this vulgar success-dream and kept urging him to enter a contest sponsored by an influential quarterly for the best long short story by a person in academic life. To be told to write for money was the final insult to his talent and to a lifetime of sacrifice to an anti-commercial ideal. The very suggestion informed him that there was a new and subtle influence at work against him on the campus. He knew where it came from—Miss Domna Rejnev, who went about murmurously confessing that she had just sold some of her wretched mannerist verse to that same influential quarterly and advising everybody else to seek publication, like a woman in an advertisement who has found satisfaction in the use of Pond’s cold cream.

  And it was this modest young lady who was daring to gibe at him to her classes under the pretense of deploring what she called the “scholasticism”
of contemporary criticism, the egoism of the modern artist-figure; he recognized her characteristic touch in the phrase that he began to hear parroted by the students: “the theophany of modern literature,” ecod! She flushed whenever she saw him, and with good reason, for she could not face the plain fact that he and Cathy had dropped her; to hide this from her following, she always pretended to be concerned and friendly, asking about the children and threatening to “look in” on Cathy, “when she had a moment to spare.” She held her head very high these days, as though her pretty ears were burning; she ought to have known that to break with him and join the herd of success-mongers and philistines was going to be a risky play.

  He watched her strolling about the campus with Bentkoop and Milton Kantorowitz, the painter, holding an arm of each and looking up earnestly into their faces, the square Dutch head and narrow, long-nosed Jewish one making, as the students said, an interesting pictorial composition, and he smiled to think that Domna regarded the two melancholy men as bucklers of invincibility, a very foolish illusion, since Bentkoop, according to his wife, was thinking of leaving Jocelyn to study for holy orders, and Kantorowitz was a learned simpleton like all painters and had no understanding whatever of the verbal disciplines and their problems and was more likely to embarrass Domna than to help her in a literary crisis.

  And that, Mulcahy assured himself, was what was on the cards. Domna had made a cardinal error in using an attack on modern literature to strike at him through the students. True, the immediate trend on the campus might seem to justify her conduct. There was a moment in the spring when the whole Jocelyn sideshow seemed to be boarding the gravy train, on to fatter triumphs of platitude and mediocrity. Dr. Hoar won an award in the field of human relations and was presented with a scroll by a United Nations luminary at a little ceremony in the chapel. Warren Austin, through an emissary, consented to speak at Commencement, and the creator of Li’l Abner was to be made a Doctor of Letters. Aristide (the Just) Poncy copped a Fulbright to lecture on Amiel in Lebanon and promptly rented his house to a grateful Mr. Mahmoud Ali Jones, whose contract, as if by jinn-magic, found itself renewed. Considine Van Tour, at the age of forty, announced his engagement to a widow with a fortune of twenty thousand a year, whom he had met at a writer’s conference in Iowa during the previous summer. Grünthal, of Psychology, got a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation for a study of the learning process, and his students were posted in every class, like Pinkerton men in a museum, observing and making assayments of the retention of auditory material. One of Furness’ long-tressed Ritas was promised a movie-test, and her father was reciprocating Furness’ introduction to an agent by a gift of a thousand dollars to finance a poetry conference, to be held in the chapel in April, with a panel of ten poets; already, of course, there was great rivalry over where they were to stay, who was to give the dinner for them, who cocktails, and so on. Yet this very poetry conference, at which Domna was expecting to scintillate, was going to teach her a little lesson in the workings of retribution—as her friend, Bentkoop, might have told her, you cannot serve God and Mammon, and she had had her first inklings of this truth at a recent departmental meeting when the committee for the conference was selected and her name was wonderfully not included.

  Mulcahy himself took no credit for this stroke; he owed it to his protégé, young Ellison, an extraordinary poet in his own right, with a firm sense of true values, and no sentimental hesitations in making them operative. The boy’s doll-like exterior, pink cheeks, Episcopal-school manner and pale, hoarse voice were belying; he had a center of iron and absolute professional integrity. Domna, who contemptuously described him as a neo-traditionalist ultra, showed her own incapacity for assessing the true direction of the modern movement as well as a pitiable lack of judgment in selecting one’s adversary. The real enemies of the future of poetry, as Mulcahy could have told her, were the sentimental progressives, like Consy Van Tour, with his flaccid, prosy devotions to K.A.P., Hemingway, Lardner, Saroyan, and the bristling methodistical moralists, like Alma Fortune, who, following Leavis and the Cambridge school, pretended to see in a man’s style glaring revelations of his personal faults and evasions, the public health inspectors placarding Finnegans Wake and the late James as diseased—these were the trough-wallowers and the trimmers, whom Domna chose to rally with in today’s crisis in contemporary art. The rediscovery of George Eliot, indeed! As he laughingly remarked to Ellison, who’s traditionalist now?

  It was Ellison, all honor to him, who had foreseen from the start the importance of keeping her off the committee and the ease with which this could be maneuvered, merely by conciliating Furness, who held the purse-strings and cared for nothing but that he should be allowed to put up two or three of the more réclames poets and give the official party for the conference in his handsome, dark-beamed, long living room. A few walks with Ellison, in his bohemian sweat-shirt and sneakers, and Furness was reluctantly able to see that to put Domna on the committee would make the wrong impression on the poets, who were surfeited with Radcliffe misses and faded libertarian poses. There was no fear in the boy and no truckling to convention. “Her verse isn’t taken seriously,” Mulcahy heard him explain to Furness, within Domna’s hearing, as if he were calmly citing some incontrovertible natural fact, and when Mulcahy poked him, he let his eyes rest square on her, coolly and neutrally, while continuing his exposition. All this, admittedly, excited Mulcahy very much; he felt something remarkable in this friendship, which reminded him, in some of its reversals, of the friendship of Verlaine and Rimbaud. Though he knew himself to be the boy’s intellectual superior, both in age and attainments, he often felt like his pupil in the ordinary affairs of life. Ellison seemed to have achieved, through youth and singlemindedness, a dizzying simplification; he did not recognize the existence of obstacles felt to be palpable by timid and second-rate people. The fact that he was not liked in the department neither grieved nor interested him; he saw that the voting strength was divided three to two against himself and Mulcahy, with Furness as the pivotal figure, and he treated Furness frankly for what he was—a pivot—making no attempt at friendship and merely assuming, at certain critical junctures, that Furness would want to be told how to vote. And simply by virtue of this assumption, his sway over Furness was near-absolute. He did not forget, either, that Domna had only half a vote, which seemed to him, in fact, her primary characteristic; he did not, like Mulcahy, worry over what she might think or do if she “caught on” to what was being planned against her. “She has only half a vote,” he replied tranquilly, whenever such conjectures were broached.

  This foresight and lucidity made a great impression on Mulcahy, who watched with respect while the department voted, unanimously, on Ellison’s suggestion, for a committee of two. Ellison was then elected, without a single dissent, and immediately nominated Mulcahy to serve with him. This was the ticklish moment; Van Tour, with an aggrieved expression, nominated Domna; Furness, looking uneasy, proposed a secret ballot. When the votes were counted, Mulcahy had won easily—there were only two counters against him, Van Tour’s and Alma’s, as he ascertained from the wastebasket; it had been an unnecessary precaution to vote for himself. Irrationally—for it had all gone according to schedule—he felt a little ashamed and supinely gave in to Furness, who also appeared to have qualms and truculently insisted that Domna should be invited to chair the important afternoon session—a quite unnecessary concession, as Ellison remarked later to Cathy, who was in full agreement.

  What fascinated Mulcahy about Ellison’s attitude toward Domna was the fact that it was completely literary and devoid of personal ill-feeling. He simply paid her no heed in extra-poetic connections, as if she were a superfluous quantity. So he treated all people who bored him and most general ideas. To people and ideas his adaptation was functional, as to food, drink, and clothing. He used only what was necessary to his immediate purpose, and his life, in Mulcahy’s eyes, in comparison to his own, had a wonderful spare, stripped beauty, like that of a
Mondrian painting. When he came to the house in the evening, he brought his own bottle with him, which he placed on the floor beside him; he accepted a glass from Cathy and refilled it till the bottle was gone. He was fond of charades and singing. He made Cathy take up her music again, so that she could sing to him in the evenings. He liked to have Henry read Joyce to him, for the rhythms and vocabulary, he explained, though Joyce did not interest him as an author: his work was too naturalistic. He ate very little and often drank himself stiff—the legend put about by the students, that he wore nothing under his outer clothing, was correct, Mulcahy found, when he put him to bed on the sofa.

  For his friends, he was full of energy and a multiplicity of plans. He discouraged Cathy from cutting her hair, in imitation of Domna, but counseled instead a permanent and large, regular old-fashioned waves, like those shown in the old Nestlé advertisements or in Morris Hirshfield’s women. One evening, he brought a shawl with him, which he said he had stolen off a piano; she put it on and danced while he blew on a mouth-organ which he produced from his dungarees’ pocket. It was he who got her to write poetry again and advised her not to show it to Henry, lest she be thought to be influenced by him. He promised to send it to Furioso, which had published some of his own verse, as soon as she accumulated enough and urged her meanwhile to write constantly, at every hour of the day, to develop that first verbal facility; he had her read Pope and Dante and listen to Caruso’s records. Encouraged, Cathy wrote steadily, on the backs of the children’s drawings, of laundry lists and achievement sheets; it was her fancy to stylize herself as a naïve or housewife poet, in the style of Grandma Moses—a shrewd idea, commended Ellison, and suggested she try Partisan Review, with an eye to being picked up by Life.